ST. NICHOLAS COLE ABBEY
The church stands in Knightrider Street; it has been known by several other names, Coldenabbey, Coldbey, etc. It was burnt down in the Great Fire, and rebuilt from the designs of Sir Christopher Wren in 1677, when the parish of St. Nicholas Olave was annexed. In 1873 it was thoroughly repaired. Four other parishes were subsequently united. The earliest date of an incumbent is 1319.
The patronage of the church was in the hands of: The Dean of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, then the Abbot and Convent of Westminster, 1532. Henry VIII., who seized it, and so continued in the Crown till Queen Elizabeth granted it in 1559 to Thomas Reeve and George Evelyn, from whom it passed to several private persons and at length came to the Hacker family in 1575, one of whom, Colonel Francis Hacker, was involved in the beheading of Charles I.; he was finally executed as a traitor, his estate including this advowson being forfeited and thus it came to the Crown, and so continued until St. Nicholas Olave was annexed after the Great Fire, when the patronage was shared alternately with the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s.
Houseling people in 1548 were 180.
The interior of the church, which contains no aisles, measures 63 feet in length, 43 feet in breadth, and 36 feet in height. The steeple, which rises at the north-west, consists of a tower of four stories concluded by a cornice with urns at each angle; above this a spire rises, completed by a balcony, and supporting a square pedestal with a finial, ball, and vane. The total height is about 135 feet.
Chantries were founded here: By John Sywarde and Thomas Blode, who endowed it with lands which fetched £6 in 1548, when Anthony Little was priest “of 50 years and of mean learning”; by John Tupley, who left lands and tenements valued at £12 : 8 : 4 in 1548, when Ralph Jackson was priest “of 30 years of age and very well learned”; Thomas Barnard, John Saunderash, and William Cogshale, who gave their lands in Distaff Lane to endow the same, which yielded £7 : 6 : 8 in 1548, when William Benson was priest, “46 years of age, and a very poor and sickly man.”
The church contained no monuments of any special note. Walter Turke, mayor in 1349, was interred here.
Barnard Randolph bequeathed £900 to this parish and St. Mary Magdalene for charities; he died in 1583. No other names are recorded by Stow.
Herbert Kynaston (1809-1878), High Master of St. Paul’s School, was rector here. But the most notable among the rectors is the most recent, Prebendary Shuttleworth, whose death in 1900 left a gap difficult to fill. Among the most notable of his social schemes was the foundation of a social club for young men and women who work in the City (see p. [219]).
Old Fish Street, partly wiped out by Knightrider Street, was a row of narrow houses built along the middle of the street like the old houses at Holborn Bars, or like Butchers’ Row behind St. Clement Danes; or like Holywell Street, Strand. Stow says:
“These houses, now possessed by fishmongers, were at the first but moveable boards or stalls, set out on market-days to show their fish sold; but procuring license to set up sheds, they grew to shops, and by little and little to tall houses of three or four stories in height, and now are called Fish Street.”
St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street, was situated on the north side of Knightrider Street at the west corner of the Old Change. It was destroyed by the Great Fire, and subsequently rebuilt and made the parish church for this and the parish of St. Gregory; but it was again burnt down in 1886, and has not been rebuilt.
In 1890 these two parishes were united to St. Martin, Ludgate. The earliest date of an incumbent is 1162.
The patronage of the church was in the hands of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s, as a vicarage, about 1162, but about 1319 it was a rectory in the same patronage and has so continued.
Houseling people in 1548 were 360.
The church formerly contained a considerable number of monuments, but the individuals commemorated were of comparatively little note. Among them was one, Barnard Randolph, common sergeant of the City of London, and benefactor of the parish. He died in 1583.
Some of the charitable gifts recorded by Stow are: A messuage, leased at £28 per annum, the gift of Thomas Berry; 40s. per annum, the gift of Justice Randall; £3 : 18s. per annum, the gift of the Company of Wax Chandlers.
In St. Gregory’s Parish, in the Ward of Castle Baynard, there was a school purchased at the cost of Alderman Barber, where thirty boys and twenty girls were educated. There was one almshouse upon Lambeth Hill.
John Hewitt was rector here; he was tried by Cromwell’s High Court of Justice in 1658 and beheaded. Also William Crowe (d. 1743), Chaplain in Ordinary to George II.
Sermon Lane.—According to Stow this was originally Sheremonier’s Lane. The name is found as “Sarmoneres,” “Sarmoners,” “Sarmouneris,” and “Seremoneres” Lane. The most interesting mention of the Street is contained in the Hist. MSS. Comm. Rept. IX., Part I. 26b. (A.D. 1315):
“Whereas a house belonging to the Chapter of St. Paul’s, at the north-east corner of ‘Sarmouneris’ Lane, has been assigned to Sir Nicholas Housebonde, minor canon of St. Paul’s, for his residence, the said Sir Nicholas has complained that it is inconvenient for the purpose on account of the grievous perils which are to be feared by reason of its distance from the cathedral and the crossing of dangerous roads by night, and the attacks of robbers, and other ill-disposed persons, which he had already suffered, and also on account of the ruinous condition of the building and the crowd of loose women who live around it. The Chapter, therefore, assigns to him a piece of ground at the end of the schools upon which to make a house.”
In Sermon Lane is the charity school. It was built in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Two quaint figures of charity children, each perhaps a couple of feet high, project from the first floor. The boy dressed in the long lapelled coat, the girl in panniers, apron, and cap. The house is of brick. The two lower floors have ordinary wide arched windows, but the two upper ones have each a unique display of no less than nine narrow, circular headed windows in a row extending across all the front. These give a curious cloistral aspect to the place. Over the doorway and two ground-floor windows are scrolls fixed up, but on one only is there an inscription, which is clearly readable, as follows:
To the Glory of God and for the benefit of the poor children of this parish of Castle Baynard Ward this house was purchased at the sole cost of John Barber, Esq., Alderman of this ward, in the year of our Lord 1722.
And on an immense plaster slab running all across the story above is “Castle Baynard Ward School, supported by voluntary contributions.”
St. Bennet’s Hill.—Strype: “Upon Paul’s Wharf Hill, within a great Gate, and belonging to that gate next to the Doctors’ Commons are many fair Tenements, which in their Leases made from the Dean and Chapter go by the name of Camera Dianæ, or Diana’s Chamber. So denominated from a spacious building that in the time of Henry II. stood where they now are standing. In this Camera, an arched and vaulted structure, this Henry II. kept, or was supposed to have kept, that jewel of his heart, fair Rosamund, whom there he called Rosa Mundi; and hereby the name of Diana. To this day are remains and some evident testifications of turnings tedious and windings as also of a passage underground from this House to Castle Baynard, which was, no doubt, the king’s way from thence to his Camera Dianæ.”
In 1452 (Hist. Comm. IX.) the “Inn called Camera Dianæ,” alias Segrave, in the parish of St. Benet is assigned by the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s to a Canon Residentiary of the Cathedral. And in 1480 we find the Camera described as a messuage with a garden let at eight marks a year to Sir John Clay; it was formerly occupied by Lord Berners, “but probably belonging to Richard Lichefield, Canon Residentiary, who pays to the Chapter 26s. a year for the obit of Richard Juvenis.